Does Pregnancy Cause Spider Veins?

The journey that a woman’s body goes through during pregnancy is nothing short of impressive. While the end result is a mostly happy one as you expand your family, the experience can leave some less-than-welcome reminders, such as spider veins on your legs.

There are more than 3.66 million births each year in the United States, leaving millions of women to deal with the aftereffects. So, if you’re dealing with post-pregnancy spider veins on your legs, you’re most certainly not alone.

The other bit of good news is that there are solutions. Here at Upper East Side Cardiology’s Vein Institute, our team of vascular experts, led by Dr. Satjit Bhusri, can make quick work of pregnancy-related spider veins.

In the following, we take a look at why pregnancy can cause spider veins and how we can clear the slate.

The pregnancy effect

As we mentioned, a woman’s body undergoes an amazing amount of change in just nine short months. Some of these changes, however, can have side effects, which is the case with spider veins.

First, as you nurture and grow a new life, your body needs additional resources, so the amount of blood volume in your body increases by up to 50%. This means that your cardiovascular system is working harder to keep up with the demand, which can weaken blood vessels.

Another issue is the higher levels of reproductive hormones in your body during your pregnancy, namely estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen hormones can act as vasodilators that relax the walls of your blood vessels, so when there’s an increase in these hormones during pregnancy, it can impact your vascular health.

Lastly, the growing fetus can place more pressure on the deep veins in your legs that return blood to your heart (inferior vena cava). This added pressure can also affect the superficial veins located nearer the surface of your skin. It’s these veins and capillaries that are affected when you develop spider veins.

As you can see, pregnancy can create a perfect storm for spider veins to develop in your legs.

Dealing with pregnancy-related spider veins

The good news is that spider veins aren’t cause for concern and they shouldn’t pose any problems, medically speaking. The bad news is that, once they form, they don’t go away on their own, which is where we come in.

We offer spider vein treatments that break up the veins and clear the surface of your skin again. In most cases, we turn to laser therapy, during which we deliver a thermal energy into the vein, causing it to collapse and seal up, at which point your body flushes away the debris.

While spider veins may be an inevitable part of pregnancy, they don’t need to take up permanent residence on your legs.

To learn more about our excellent spider vein treatments, please contact our New York City office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to set up an appointment. You can also call (212) 752-3464.